Key concepts and terminology in brand management

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Key concepts in brand management 

Here are some key concepts and terminology in brand management:

1. Brand Identity: The unique set of visual, verbal, and experiential elements that represent a brand and differentiate it from competitors. It includes the brand name, logo, tagline, color palette, typography, tone of voice, and overall brand aesthetics.
2. Brand Positioning: The distinctive place a brand occupies in the minds of consumers in relation to its competitors. It involves defining the target market, identifying the brand’s unique value proposition, and communicating it effectively to the target audience.
3. Brand Equity: The intangible value and strength of a brand. It represents the positive associations, perceptions, and emotional connections that consumers have with a brand. Strong brand equity leads to increased customer loyalty, higher brand preference, and the ability to command premium pricing.
4. Brand Awareness: The level of recognition and familiarity that consumers have with a brand. It can be measured by the brand’s visibility, recall, and recognition among the target audience.
5. Brand Image: The overall impression or perception that consumers have about a brand. It is formed by the brand’s characteristics, reputation, past experiences, and associations. Brand image can be influenced by marketing efforts, customer experiences, and word-of-mouth.
6. Brand Promise: The unique benefit or value proposition that a brand offers to its customers. It represents the key promise or commitment that the brand makes to its customers and sets it apart from competitors.
7. Brand Extension: The practice of leveraging the strength and recognition of an existing brand to introduce new products or enter new markets. Brand extensions capitalize on the existing brand equity and consumer trust to facilitate the acceptance and success of the new offerings.
8. Brand Loyalty: The degree of customer attachment and commitment to a particular brand. It reflects repeat purchases, positive word-of-mouth, and resistance to switching to competitors. Brand loyalty is often built through consistent positive experiences, strong brand relationships, and emotional connections with consumers.
9. Brand Touchpoints: The various points of interaction between a brand and its customers throughout the customer journey. Brand touchpoints include websites, social media, packaging, customer service, advertising, and other channels or experiences where customers engage with the brand.
10. Brand Management: The strategic activities and processes involved in developing, maintaining, and enhancing a brand. It includes activities such as brand positioning, brand identity development, brand communication, brand monitoring, and brand performance evaluation.
11. Brand Architecture: The hierarchical structure and relationship between different brands and sub-brands within a company’s portfolio. It defines how individual brands are organized and connected to each other, considering factors such as brand hierarchy, brand extensions, and brand cohesiveness.
12. Brand Guidelines: The set of rules, standards, and guidelines that define how a brand should be represented visually, verbally, and experientially across different touchpoints. Brand guidelines ensure consistency and coherence in brand communication and help maintain the brand’s identity.
13. Brand Audit: A comprehensive evaluation of a brand’s current position, performance, and equity. It involves analyzing brand assets, customer perceptions, market trends, and competitive landscape to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the brand.
14. Brand Personality: The set of human characteristics, traits, and values that are associated with a brand. Brand personality helps to humanize the brand and create emotional connections with consumers.
15. Brand Ambassador: An individual, celebrity, or influencer who represents and promotes a brand. Brand ambassadors embody the brand’s values, endorse its products or services, and help create positive associations and awareness among their followers or target audience.
16. Brand Differentiation: The process of establishing unique and meaningful differences between a brand and its competitors. Brand differentiation helps to create a competitive advantage by highlighting the brand’s distinctive attributes, benefits, or values that set it apart in the market.
17. Brand Story: The narrative or storytelling approach used to communicate the brand’s heritage, values, and purpose. A brand story helps to create an emotional connection with consumers and provides context for the brand’s existence and offerings.
18. Brand Experience: The sum total of all interactions and touchpoints that a customer has with a brand. It encompasses both tangible and intangible elements, including product/service quality, customer service, packaging, website experience, and overall brand perception.
19. Brand Extension: The strategy of leveraging an existing brand’s equity to introduce new products or expand into new markets. Brand extensions allow companies to capitalize on the familiarity and trust associated with the existing brand to drive acceptance and adoption of the new offerings.
20. Brand Recall: The ability of consumers to retrieve and recognize a brand from memory when prompted with a product category or related cues. Strong brand recall indicates a high level of brand awareness and salience among the target audience.
21. Brand Reputation: The overall perception and evaluation of a brand’s trustworthiness, credibility, and reliability. It is influenced by a brand’s past actions, performance, and public perception and plays a significant role in shaping consumer attitudes and purchase decisions.
22. Brand Resilience: The ability of a brand to withstand and recover from challenges, crises, or negative events. A resilient brand can effectively manage and mitigate reputational damage, maintain customer loyalty, and bounce back from adverse situations.
23. Brand Alignment: The consistency and alignment of a brand’s values, messaging, and actions across all touchpoints and within the organization. Brand alignment ensures that the brand’s identity and promises are reflected in every aspect of the brand’s communication and customer experiences.
24. Brand Saturation: The state where a brand becomes excessively present or ubiquitous in the marketplace, leading to decreased consumer interest or differentiation. Brand saturation can occur when a brand overspends on advertising, expands too rapidly, or loses its unique appeal.
25. Brand Licensing: The practice of granting permission to third-party companies to use a brand’s name, logo, or other intellectual property in exchange for royalties or licensing fees. Brand licensing allows brands to extend their reach and generate additional revenue by leveraging their brand equity.
26. Brand Equity Measurement: The process of assessing and quantifying the financial value and strength of a brand. Various methods and metrics are used to measure brand equity, including brand valuation models, customer surveys, and financial performance indicators.
27. Brand Portfolio: The collection of different brands owned by a company. A brand portfolio may include multiple brands that target different market segments, serve different customer needs, or operate in different industries.
28. Brand Migration: The process of transitioning a brand from one market segment, target audience, or product category to another. Brand migration requires careful strategic planning to ensure that the brand’s equity and associations are effectively transferred to the new context.
29. Brand Revitalization: The strategic effort to breathe new life into a brand that has lost its relevance or market appeal. Brand revitalization may involve repositioning, redesigning the brand identity, revising the marketing strategy, or introducing new products/services to re-engage customers and regain market share.
30. Brand Advocacy: The act of customers or employees actively promoting and advocating for a brand. Brand advocates are enthusiastic supporters who voluntarily share positive experiences and recommendations, helping to amplify the brand’s reach and influence.
31. Brand Identity Prism: A model developed by Jean-Noël Kapferer that represents the six facets of a brand’s identity: physique (product features and design), personality (human-like characteristics), culture (values and beliefs), relationship (brand-consumer interaction), reflection (how consumers see themselves when using the brand), and self-image (how the brand wants consumers to perceive themselves).
32. Brand Architecture: The strategic structure and hierarchy of a company’s brands, including the relationships between the corporate brand, sub-brands, and product lines. Brand architecture helps to define the organization and positioning of brands within a company’s portfolio.
33. Co-Branding: A partnership between two or more brands to create a joint product or service that leverages the strengths and equity of each brand. Co-branding allows brands to expand their reach, tap into new markets, and benefit from shared resources and expertise.
34. Brand Essence: The core essence or fundamental nature of a brand that captures its unique value proposition and emotional appeal. It represents the brand’s intrinsic qualities and the emotional benefits it provides to consumers.
35. Brand Ecosystem: The network of interconnected entities, channels, and touchpoints that contribute to the creation, delivery, and experience of a brand. A brand ecosystem includes suppliers, distributors, retailers, online platforms, social media, and customer communities.
36. Brand Promise: A clear and compelling statement that communicates what a brand promises to deliver to its customers in terms of benefits, experiences, or solutions. The brand promise sets customer expectations and serves as a guiding principle for brand actions and behaviors.
37. Brand Equity Pyramid: A model that illustrates the hierarchical levels of brand equity, developed by Kevin Lane Keller. The pyramid consists of four levels: brand salience (awareness and recognition), brand performance (functional benefits), brand imagery (associations and perceptions), and brand resonance (emotional connection and loyalty).
38. Brand Stretching: The practice of extending a brand into new product categories or markets that are beyond its original scope. Brand stretching allows brands to leverage their existing equity and consumer trust, but it also carries the risk of diluting the brand’s meaning and cannibalizing existing offerings.
39. Brand Coherence: The consistency and alignment of a brand’s various elements, including visual identity, messaging, values, and customer experience. Brand coherence ensures that all brand components work together harmoniously to deliver a unified and cohesive brand experience.
40. Brand Tribes: Groups of consumers who share a strong affinity and loyalty towards a particular brand and actively engage with it. Brand tribes often form communities, both online and offline, where they connect with like-minded individuals and participate in brand-related activities.
41. Brand Ethics: The ethical principles and values that guide a brand’s actions and decisions. Brand ethics involve responsible sourcing, fair labor practices, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility. Brands that prioritize ethical practices can build trust and goodwill among consumers.
42. Brand Hijacking: When another individual, organization, or competitor exploits a brand’s reputation, visibility, or popularity for their own benefit. Brand hijacking can occur through unauthorized use of trademarks, false endorsements, or manipulating brand messaging for malicious purposes.
43. Brand Equity Transfer: The process of transferring and leveraging the equity and associations of an established brand to a new brand or product within the same company. Brand equity transfer can help to accelerate brand recognition, acceptance, and adoption for the new offering.
44. Brand Metrics: Quantitative and qualitative measures used to evaluate and track the performance and impact of a brand. Brand metrics may include brand awareness, brand preference, customer loyalty, market share, customer satisfaction, and brand perception indicators.
45. Brand Storytelling: The strategic use of narratives, anecdotes, and storytelling techniques to communicate a brand’s values, purpose, and offerings. Brand storytelling helps to engage and connect with consumers on an emotional level, making the brand more memorable and relatable.

These are just a few key concepts and terms in brand management. The field of brand management is vast, and there are many more theories, models, and strategies that contribute to creating and managing successful brands.

What is brand experience?

Here is how I began the abstract of this paper: ‘SOOP branding – ‘superficial out-of-profundity’’ – focuses on the seemingly ‘superficial’ world of sensory, affective and creative experiences, which have been largely ignored by marketers and brand managers.’ And I concluded by saying, ‘SOOP branding thus proposes to treat consumers as living human beings with experiential needs rather than as rational price – and attribute-driven information processors.’

By now, in 2009, the term ‘SOOP branding’ is not well established in the branding literature. Nowadays, I and others refer to the approach outlined in this paper as ‘experiential branding.’ The term ‘experiential branding,’ on the other hand, has definitely caught on. In business practice, ‘experience’ is one of the ‘hottest’ movements. Numerous trade writings on experience have appeared over the years and I have contributed a couple on my own.5, 6 There are experience projects in a variety of industries, ranging from telecom to automotive to retailing businesses. Most importantly, companies have created new executive positions that are exclusively focused on managing customers’ experiences with brands.

I firmly believe that the concept of brand experience captures the very essence of branding much more than analytically and cognitively oriented brand concepts such as brand equity, brand value, brand associations, brand attitudes and brand personality. What ultimately matters to consumers is whether brands can provide attractive experiences for them. To be sure, consumers are also looking for value, and for the right features, associations and brand personalities. But this is true for products as well. From brands, consumers expect something more distinct. They want something that engages their senses and touches their hearts. Something that excites or intrigues them. They want marketers to provide them with an experience. They are looking for something real and authentic, and not just ad slogans and messages that are supposed to target cognitions in their mind.

You can thus read my 1997 SOOP branding paper in this Journal as a passionate plea to go beyond mere functionality and utility, and to transcend the cognitive information processing paradigm by incorporating sensory, emotional and creative concepts into our thinking about brands.

I was not the first to argue that mainstream analytical and cognitive model, which define most of the marketing and branding literature, are incomplete. I was standing on the shoulders of giants. The giants in this case were my colleagueat Columbia Business School MorrisHolbrook and his co-author ElizabethHirshman who, years before, had written a highly influential paper on the ‘experiential aspects of consumption.’7 Subtitle: ‘Consumer fantasies, feelings, and fun.’ I loved the paper but felt that the subsequent work, especially the interpretive work following it, was unnecessarily limiting; interpretive research applied the term ‘experience’ exclusively to special art phenomena and idiosyncratic hobbies such as jazz, art collecting and sky diving. My own interests and concerns were broader. I felt thatthe concept of experience could be applied to brands – all sort of brands in all sortof categories. To do so, however, wewould need to go beyond Holbrook and Hirshman’s (1982) paper.

What I felt we needed was a rigorous definition of experience, a reliable and valid measurement instrument, and a conceptual network of experience antecedents and consequences. We know a lot about brand equity and brand value, and we have elaborate models and measurements for brand-association constructs such as brand personality.8 Yet, we know very little about how consumers experience a brand; how we can measure brand experiences; and whether brand experiences are simply an epiphenomenon or whether they can influence consumer behaviour. In sum, we need to develop the brand-experience construct conceptually, and I urge us all to do so.

That is not an easy task. Unlike other brand concepts and measurement scales, which we took from psychology and subsequently transferred to brand research, the concept of brand experience requires a broader, more inter-disciplinary research approach. Work on experience can be found in a variety of different fields, ranging from philosophy and cognitive science, to literature and the arts. We need to examine this literature for insights and apply it to the area of branding.

In a forthcoming paper, my co-authors and I have tried to take a first step.9 We defined brand experiences as ‘subjective, internal consumer responses (sensations, feelings and cognitions) as well as behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand’s design and identity, packaging, communications and environments.’ We distinguished various experience dimensions (sensory, affective, intellectual and behavioural) and showed how these dimensions can be measured. We also showed that experiences can affect certain aspects of consumer behaviour(satisfaction and loyalty).

Yet, much more needs to be done to fully establish the concept in our field. One key question concerns the antecedents of experiences. How exactly can brand-related stimuli (names, logos, colors, shapes and so on) that are part of a brand’s marketing evoke brand experiences? Or consider one particular marketing tool – events. We need to relate dimensions of the event (for example, entertainment, interactivity, face-to-face service) to dimensions of experience. Similar issues could be investigated for other marketing tools (for example, advertising, sales promotions, new media). For example, how do these tools evoke experiences? These are not just academic questions. Experience managers in companies urgently need answers to these questions to replace their intuitive guidelines with systematic planning tools.

Another key question concerns the consequences of brand experience: Are most brand experiences just epiphenomena – that is, when they occur they are just fun for consumers? Do they influence consumer behaviour only in the short term? Or can they have long-term effects? For example, can experiences build brand equity, or rather, customer equity, that is, customer lifetime value?

Finally, what is the relation between brand experience and other brand constructs? There has been an inflation in brand constructs and measurements over the years. In the paper mentioned earlier, we showed conceptually and empirically, that brand experiences are distinct from some key cognitive, motivational and affective constructs such as brand attitudes, brand involvement, brand attachment and customer delight. But clearly there must be some empirical relation between brand experience and motivational and emotional brand concepts, especially when we examine their impact on consumer behavior. What is that relation? Are certain concepts more basic or primary than others? Which ones are most useful for formulating brand strategy?

As these questions illustrate, research on brand experience offers a rich area of inquiry. Experience is a profound concept focused on one of the most important aspects of our lives: the seemingly superficial world of brands.